Financially prudent individuals develop financial plans that aid them achieve their financial goals. Traditionally, many of these individuals have entrusted their financial plans to personal financial advisors.
More recently, however, some individuals have increasingly relied upon computer-based systems that organize their financial assets and liabilities and further provide them with a summary of their financial health. However, these systems tend to focus on the administrative aspects of financial planning without enabling the user to make reasoned choices about their financial futures. Furthermore, these systems are limited by their inability to dynamically analyze the financial goals. These limitations are counterproductive to the user's needs to develop and manage an integrated personal financial plan from an executive decision-making perspective.
Many existing financial management systems allow users to electronically organize their financial assets and liabilities. These systems typically focus on presenting the user with a summary of their financial transactions over a given period of time and their financial health, at a given instance. Furthermore, these systems typically rely on the user to continually update their personal financial data, although some systems allow access to user specific online data. As a result, these systems are merely data-driven calculators that are incapable of providing the user with meaningful financial coaching tailored to their financial intentions and expectations.
Similarly, some financial management systems present a static view of the user's financial health. These systems typically require the user to provide the most current financial data relating to their financial assets and liabilities. Consequently, when the user wishes to develop or update his or her financial plan, the user must input their most recent financial information. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that these systems demand a lot of typing and guessing when the user enters financial data. This process is time-consuming and inefficient and does not promote an intuitive understanding of how complex financial variables interact to produce a sensible financial plan. A true user-friendly system would have to include a simple and intuitive graphical user interface. A Financial modeling is not very useful and accurate if the user does not submit all of his financial data because it is tedious to input all that data.
Another problem with many existing financial management systems is that the user is typically limited to managing the transactional details of their financial data. In these systems, the user is shielded from the planning and deciding aspects of developing their financial plan. Accordingly, the user learns very little from the process and remains heavily dependent on the system to provide an accurate summary of their financial health. These limitations further exacerbate the lack of trust inherent within the relationship between the user and the financial management system.
Financial coaching is another feature lacking from most of today's financial system. The use of a live advisor is expensive. Furthermore, a great deal of the time spent with a live advisor is spent on isolating the problem and not attacking the causes of it.
No system currently exists that dynamically incorporates all of the user's financial assets and liabilities into an integrated summary of their health. Individuals do not want to focus on the transactional details of their financial information. Instead, individuals desire to assume an executive decision-making role in managing their financial life. A financial management system is needed where the user is provided with an integrated summary of their financial health and is given personalized financial coaching tailored to his or her financial goals and intentions.